Edward P. Jones Quotes

He knew he was going to die but he thought this little thing might provide him with a nothing stool way off in the corner of heaven reserved for fools, people too stupid to come out of the rain. People got to that corner by heaven's back door.

But he was a free and clear man, and the law said so. Augustus never hurt me, never said bad to me. What Harvey done was wrong. But tellin you don’t put me on the nigger side. I’m still on the white man side, John. I’m still standin with the white. God help me if you believe somethin else about me.

Most crimes and misdemeanors by slaves were dealt with by their masters; they could even hang a slave if he killed another slave, but that would have been like throwing money down a well after the slave had already thrown the first load of money down, as William Robbins once told Skiffington.

"Render your body to them" his father had taught, "but know your soul belongs to God."

It mattered not how long he had wandered in the wilderness, how long they had kept him in chains, how long he had helped them and kept himself in his own chains; none of that mattered now. He patted the baby’s back, turned around and went back to the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans. No, it did not matter. It mattered only that those kind of chains were gone and that he had crawled out into the clearing and was able to stand up on his hind legs and look around and appreciate the difference between then and now, even on the awful Richmond days when the now came dressed as the then.

God is in his heaven and he don't care most of the time. The trick of life is to know when God does care and do all you need to do behind his back.

[He] went on to tell her that certain work songs made the work a little easier, but that there were others, depending upon the time of day, that dragged a body down, so 'you just gotta be careful with your songs and your hummin' and whatnot.

The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.

But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self. Don’t go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there.

If it was true what her mother had once told her, then nothing rang the telephone like death in the middle of the night.

We leave, we run away and don't realize how much we'll need to go back home one day. The South is like that. It's the worst mama in the world and it's the best mama in the world.

We are all worthy of one another.

"(Her husband's departure ...) had picked Mildred up by the hair and dropped her down at the doorstep of insanity.
From "Butterfly on F street

Calvin had long been uneasy in his own person and so lived to put everyone else at ease.

Henry,” Robbins said, looking not at him but out to the other side ofthe road, “the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. That protection lasts from here” — and he pointed to an imaginary place in the road — “all the way to the death ofthat property” — and he pointed to a place a few feet from the first place. “But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave. And it does not matter ifyou are not much more darker than your slave. The law is blind to that. You are the master and that is all the law wants to know. The law will come to you and stand behind you. But ifyou roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property turns round and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you will need. You will have failed in your part ofthe bargain. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter.